


Fearfully Made

by orphan_account



Series: Stories of Nod [1]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Birth complications, Body Horror, Eye Horror, Gen, birth imagery, regular helena warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 17:56:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3578619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Legend has it, a woman walked out of DYAD one day and gave birth to gods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fearfully Made

**Author's Note:**

> "Wanderers this morning  
> came by. Where do they go?  
> Graceful in the morning light...  
> Dear shadow, alive and well  
> How can the body die? You tell  
> Me everything, anything true."
> 
> \--Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, Fleet Foxes

Once in school my teacher cupped an ice cube in her hands and asked each us to blow onto it. We ambled into a line, occasionally ducking our heads from the row to watch as each classmate bowed before the teacher and blew into her hands.

 She held her hands over the desk with a smile tucked into her lips; I savor the memory of her smile (as I do with all these stories), the parenthetical dimple on her left cheek, the way it would creep into the network of lines around her eyes whenever she was truly happy.

When I arrived before her hands, the ice cube was nothing but a puddle on her desk.

She cocked her head at me with that curious crook at her lips.

“Where did it go?” She asked.

I pointed solemnly at her desk.

She swept her hand across the table until the water was skim along the surface, "How about now?"

Again, I pointed at the desk.

She smiled, held a cup under the lip of the desk, swept some water into it, and lit a match. We watched as the match glimmered a fiery red within the cup and consumed the water into nothingness.

"How about now?" She asked smugly, eyeing me. “Helen, what do you think?”

A fire bloomed in my cheeks as I glanced at the water still pooled on the desk; it was nothing but a weak puddle now.

“Where’s the water in the glass?” The teacher repeated.

"Gone," I said. “The fire ate it,”

A smile spread across her face, stretching into the lines under her eyes.

“Are you sure?” She asked, and turned to the whiteboard behind her. The sharp scent of marker filled the air as she scrawled five words across the board: **LAW OF CONSERVATION OF MATTER.**

Then she faced the class, “Yes, the water has changed--has been split from its previous form entirely. But it remains here in this room, all around us, ready to return to water if need be. Matter may be transformed or split, but never destroyed."

 This stuck with me somehow, the idea that nothing is separated forever. That we are meant to find each other again, and become one.

 We belong to each other, whatever form that may be.

 

**~~X~~**

 

This story begins (and ends) with this single law. I will tell it to you as my mother told it to me: in parts.

It doesn't matter how the story is told as long as nothing is left out or fabricated. Just as the same matter slips into different skins and returns through cycles of nature over time, so does the stuff of stories.

 

The story I tell you might be true, and might not be, for it is like the story of old (translated over centuries into innumerable languages and forms until even it is unrecognizable to itself).

This too is a myth, an origin, a hypothesis, a theory, and a law.

 

The earth churned us up from its soil so that we may know the stars overhead as well as the pulsing neurons within, and in time return to it as children to their mothers. A cycle applied equally to matter across the universe.

 

But mankind believed itself above this law. We deserved an exception to the rule, right?

We can destroy atoms, so we must create them as well. 

One day, a woman of great worth thought, "Why must I die? Why must I extinguish my existence over generations of others diluting my genes?"

So she collected a team of scientists who translated her genetic code into blueprints for new life and saw that they were good.

Then she looked at the test tubes, the cells of her youth, and said, "They will be barren so that my image remains pure." And so it was done.

When all but a few embryos were inseminated, she returned to her band of scientists and said, "Ensure that my image is protected. I will have monitors to record the lives of my children so that I may know which life is best lived." And so it was done.

The scientists exalted in her image and found glory in her ideas. They formed an organization in her name: Neolution.

"May we find eternal life in her glory," they cried.

But one man did not like the woman's message.

In the beginning, he had been her director of procedures and was the most passionate of the other scientists. He said, "Let us give your image the genes of other creatures so that you may be stronger in the years to come."

But now he hung back with gloom. Bitterness lay silent in his face and flashed only in his chagrined smiles.

He often muttered to himself, "Why must she have eternal life while we die, alone and nameless?"

Slowly, he severed his ties to Neolution and began communication with a private company sanctioned in the Military.

The Life of the project lay in their hands, whether the woman was aware of it or not.

For the military could give the elixir of life, a legal patent, or condemn them to illegal activities.

The man rose silently in these ranks and collected a worthy army. He dreamed of destruction.

But on the day of his attack, the woman approached him. Her footsteps reverberated off the walls and signaled for silence everywhere while her eyes suggested utter stillness. That was the power of eternal life, he supposed, but not for long.

"I have no interest in war, my old friend," she said.

"Then destroy it. Everything."

A faint smile twitched at her lips but her eyes hardened.

"You don't want me as an enemy," she said and slid a paper across the table. He glanced at the top.

"What’s DYAD?" He asked. She fit her knuckles beneath her chin and watched him for a moment.

"It's us," she murmured. "A duel partnership. Use the military to patent our genes and I won't bankrupt your entire family. Make us legal and then take your property. We never have to see each other again."

With that, the man retreated to the barracks and developed his clones together while the woman spread hers apart.

They were never physically seen together again, but were no longer two separate bodies.

They reigned as a two-headed god. One created and the other enforced, but they both destroyed.

Two generations of clones were built up like clay only to be wiped clean from the earth, deemed as failures, defected, and impure.

With each failure they returned to the same genes, searching of a combination that would create the perfect human being.

A flawed design was easier to swallow than admitting the truth: they worked with a faulty set of genes.

Every set of clones were predispositioned to illness and disease, some of which showed symptoms early in life.

Failure altered their minds like a slow rot. 

They continued this cycle of creation and destruction until  their procedure for it was immaculate. 

Eventually, their operations were so efficient that nothing changed in their death (as they had planned, I suppose).

The three remaining factions silently took over, holding all of their passion and none of the hesitancy.

Ultimately, they all tangled into one organism like a cluster of veins knotting into a single heart.

Topside, Neolution, and Prolethean became the three heads of a single idea. DYAD was the knotted heart, pumping life into its gnashing mouths.

This was the appeal: the idea that DYAD was a real creature of sorts, a deity which forged itself for the benevolence of mankind. 

DYAD had no body or form, nor did it have thoughts or a will of its own.

It was a network of departments, companies, and organizations with factions branching off in every direction.

And yet, it would settle so deeply in a person that they heard it breathing at the back of their head. It became a voice interwoven through their being, "Why shouldn't you? It is your right, your destiny."

It didn't need a body. For it wasn't born from a human's body, but from their mind.

It learned from its parents' death the greatest fear of mankind. (Oblivion, a fate much worse than death).

From there, it learned how to hypnotize people from all over the world and draw them into its folds. It devoured their minds and left them hollow puppets, capable of dragging more people to its belly.

It breathed "sacrifice" into their ears and watched as their gears spun and whirred until the deed was done. (Headline: **SIX DEAD IN LABORATORY BLAST** ).

It operated on a single mission: sustain the clone population. Always create more clones, but disable their ability to reproduce, and give them short lives.

When the clone population exceeds carrying capacity (and the ability to maintain secrecy), the Proletheans suddenly find a prophet able to locate more clones.

None of the people within these organizations were aware of their connection, of course.

They are crooned to sleep by gentle whispers of self-importance, that matter is destroyed and recreated utterly new, and then blinded by the single-track mind of the masses. Just another sheep in the herd.

That is, until the chain was broken. Legend has it, a woman walked out of DYAD one day and gave birth to gods.

 

**~~ X ~~**

 

The seventh day after conception, the fertilized eggs split in two.

The moment was robbed from Amelia as the doctor announced it with a flash of a picture which was promptly pinned to a Manila folder and put away.

A week into embryonic development, she had begun to realize that the screenings were not for her.

The lab coats buzzed around the room as they replaced their snapping blue gloves, busy with the excitement of "interacting with the womb."

Amelia had been staring at the ultrasound, her hands folded just above her belly, feeling incredibly bored.

Her paychecks had begun to pale in comparison to the awful amount of time she spent within these gleaming white walls, enduring the cold jelly and even colder hospitality.

At that moment, the clot of cells on screen flickered with a quick spasm of life.

She glanced at the circus around her to see if the doctors had noticed, then she returned. 

The embryos remained side-by-side, unanimous in size. Innocent onlookers to the busy world outside.

She glanced at the men hidden behind their boards, the ends of their pens whizzing in the air in silent conduction, and then back at the screen.

Leaning in, she whispered, "Don't hurry out too quick."

Just then, another flash sparked at the bridge between their embryos.

"We've got a heartbeat," one of the men said. Amelia ignored him, focusing instead on the shared heartbeat between them. How must that feel? To share a heart. To know the pulse of your heart feels identical to the life beside you.

This was their first shared experience as twins. Shouldn't that matter to anyone? Where were their parents?

She felt like an onlooker to her own pregnancy, already helpless to the miserable lives these two would share.

That moment reprised in her mind nearly nine months later as she stood in a half-full bathtub, heaving out the uneasy life from inside her.

She hid in the darkest pocket of an unknown city, far away from DYAD's omniscient eye.

But it would never be far enough for her.

DYAD had implanted a charge of terror in the marrow of her bones, and it made her skittish; fear of complacency, the only trait she would pass on to her beloved orphans.

One of her helpers clasped Amelia's hand and gave it a good squeeze. She was a handsome young woman distinguished by her broad features. Siobhan Sadler was her name, but Amelia wouldn't know that for many years.

"Almost there, love," Siobhan murmured as she stared at the woman's belly. _No way there's only one baby in there_ , she thought.

Pregnancy didn't make sense to her. Who would willingly subject themselves to months of discomfort? Just to heave out a child that would learn to hate you anyway.

Sarah clamored into the world first, with blind eyes and raw skin. She cleaned the child while Amelia was wracked with ghost-labor.

Her skin clammed at the faintest breath and turned between a grave purple hue and rose pink.

Air burst from her mouth in shocked spurts and filled the cavities of her newfound lungs.

"Where will you take her?" Siobhan asked, watching as Amelia face contorted in agony.

Was after-birth really this painful?

"The...church...," she gasped.

Just then, she let out a shocked cry. Siobhan saw that another child was coming, but she had no place to put Sarah. So she watched in horror as Amelia gave birth alone.

Helena fell from her mother like an afterthought. She hit the water with a sickening pop and was accompanied by the dark placenta. 

A frightened sob tore from Amelia's throat as she pulled Helena from the water.

She found a dark cord wrapped around her shoulder and worked to loosen its biting grip (had it been around her neck, Helena would have died. Killed by the body of her mother). She cleaned the child with trembling fingers and a heart full of guilt. 

"I'm sorry," she whispered, "I'm so sorry."

Helena gasped against her mother's chest, traumatized by her tumultuous birth and the loss of her other half. Her blind eyes swept over the room in search for something she could not recognize, for she only knew her sister by the throb of her heart.

But Amelia was swept into a miniature world where only she and Helena existed. Swaying gently, she crooned hymns into the child's ear.

Meanwhile, Siobhan looked down at Sarah's drooping eyes and cradled her closer, hoping the warmth of her battered heart was enough.

"You're a fighter,"She whispered, "I can tell. Otherwise I wouldn't like you so much."

She looked back at the other child and felt resentment clot in her heart. Helena was more of a shadow than a child; an echo to the real thing. Her skin was gray with blots of purple and her breath was ragged.

"This one will go to the church," Amelia said, smiling softly at Helena. "She's a tender soul, I can tell."

Siobhan pursed her lips and swallowed the words burning in her throat. Love is selfish, she decided.

She'll take her child to Carlton, and be rid of it. 

 

**~~ X ~~**

 

In the absence of two clones, DYAD hissed for another. This time, human error would be taken out of the equation. The child would be raised outside of the dark and impenetrable womb.

For the most part: they needed someone who could start the process.

Susan Duncan, a demure woman of silent ambition, pursed her lips and accepted the transplant for over seven months. She watched her body bloat with a pregnancy it would not finish.

When Rachel Duncan was of age for a cesarean section, she was placed inside an incubator. Susan's body was devastated, pumping her brain with a cocktail mix of hormones designed for tragedy. She watched her body deflate and felt the first spark of hatred towards DYAD.

Rachel developed in a bright, transparent box that was wrapped in blankets. Her eyes were still opaque, not yet complete, but she still must have seen it. She had to know that she was dislocated from the place she had been in for the past seven months.

Scientists came in once a day to examine her development. They were most interested in her eyes. It was sickening, the amount of care dedicated to a child who was no more than an experiment. In years to come, they would boast about the first child raised outside the womb. No one would care about the child, only the accomplishment itself.

Susan often sat by the child’s window and grazed a finger over the curled hand, still just the size of a quarter. 

“DYAD wants us to take her,” Ethan said one day. He usually avoided the incubator and all the raw material developing in there. It unsettled him, but he never explained why. 'You're weak,' she wanted to say. 

“Who, specifically?” She asked as the child sputtered into its mouth tube. 

Ethan raised his shoulders weakly and dropped them again.

“Just DYAD,” he said.

There was nothing left to say after that (You're weak you're weak you're weak).

The machinery around them whirred and gasped, sending spurts of oxygen and nutrients into the child at timed intervals in the day. 

No one else seemed to be concerned with the fact that the first sound she would ever hear was among the gasps, clicks, and buzzes of the surrounding machinery.

That unsettled her more than the empty gaze of her developing eyes, the idea that this child would begin her life isolated from the rest of her species. 

Who could truly understand warmth or the persistency of another’s heart if their experience is limited to the hushed whirring of a machine?

Would she even recognize the sound of a heart? Would she know its implications? Who could comfort her in times of weakness?

Her first taste of oxygen was delivered by a steel tank. The purity of the air bubbled in her brain and created her first dream. It was of stars expanding across her vision until they were nothing but desolate pits. The monitor recorded her hearbeat in sputtered lines, but the child never cried.

Susan knew that she was frightened, but she didn't cry. She couldn't. All she could do was stare at the interior of her incubator and breathe.

They took Rachel home that day. Susan mustered all the maternal instinct in her bones and decorated her room to be dark and quiet.

Rachel cried all night long, disturbed by the silence, and only stopped when Susan wandered to her crib and picked her up. She curled Rachel over her chest so that her ear lay at the center of Susan's chest.

“Feel my heart; remember the sound,” she said, “You have one too, just like mine.”

Then Susan went to work one day and never came back. The lab had combusted but no one could find what had sparked it. No one investigated.

When Rachel eventually returned to the glittering white walls of DYAD, she lay still on her bed and listened to the machinery.

The walls were alive with sounds of a dozen different machines--and she noticed something.

A familiar rhythm lay in the concordant clicks and jumps, hums and whirring puffs.

They resembled a heartbeat.

**~~ X ~~**

Three lives. Identical in all ways that can be observed, and yet entirely different. 

They were wanderers of the world, bound to walk with bloodied feet across the tracks of history. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I am not a molecular scientist. Any knowledge comes from the internet.


End file.
